


Look Around

by GreenLies



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst, Falling In Love, Fluff, Friendship, Games, Hanahaki Disease, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-20
Updated: 2020-06-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:02:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24826516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreenLies/pseuds/GreenLies
Summary: Kenma should have known that playing a multiplayer game was a bad idea to begin with.
Relationships: Hinata Shouyou/Kozume Kenma
Comments: 3
Kudos: 99





	Look Around

Kenma should have known that playing a multiplayer game was a bad idea to begin with. He operated alone. He always had. 

But Kuroo had given him the disk for his birthday, and Kenma felt obligated to do _something_ with it, so here he was, listening to a bunch of strangers yell into the headset. 

He met Shouyou through a video game. And if that wasn’t the most ironic thing about this whole experience. 

Kenma didn’t love romantically. It wasn’t anything sad, or upsetting. It was simply an emotion that he didn’t believe he was built for. He had never felt anything more than platonic love for people in his life, and believed it would always be like that. 

But then, Shouyou snuck into his life. 

Calling it sneaking wouldn’t be completely accurate. Shouyou had _burst_ into his life - flooded it with a barrage of sound and color and pure, unfiltered happiness. And like a fool, Kenma let him. 

He didn’t know what the boy looked like, despite the fact that they spoke daily. Kenma would race home from practice and plug in his headset and boot up the game and Shouyou would log on a few minutes after. They played together, with Shouyou talking about the game and their school and his volleyball team and whatever else was on his mind. He would stutter if he talked too fast and spoke with a strange little lilt and his laughter was loud and brash and beautiful. 

Kenma knew that Shouyou himself was beautiful, even if he had never seen his face. 

Kenma wasn’t a big talker. He never had been. But Shouyou never seemed to mind, speaking more to fill up the empty space, listening intently when Kenma decided he had something to say. 

And Kenma didn’t realize he was falling for Shouyou until it was too late. 

He thought the drop in his stomach when he heard Shouyou’s voice, or the excitement to see him that built all day, was normal. He thought it was just the excitement of meeting someone new. And even after, when he began to consider the possibility that he may be feeling something more, he didn’t think it would become a problem . 

Because Shouyou lived in Miyagi. Four hours away, on a good day. Their proximity, or lack thereof, would be enough to stomp out Kenma’s feelings quickly. 

That was until _it_ happened. 

Kenma didn’t remember the exact order of events. He and Shouyou were playing their game, as usual, and Shouyou was talking through the headset about one thing or another when Kenma’s throat began to itch horribly. 

He lost concentration for a moment. His character died. 

_“Kenma, what happened? We were doing so well!”_ Shouyou didn’t sound angry, just concerned. He never got angry, even when they lost. 

Kenma tried to respond, but his throat prickled and his stomach turned. He sprinted to the bathroom. 

He was no stranger to getting sick - he had often come down with wicked fevers the day after matches when he was younger. He pushed his hair out of his face and leaned over the toilet, heaving. 

Instead of his dinner, however, a few petals splashed into the water. He grabbed one gingerly, examining it. There was no blood or bile coating them. They were a clear, vibrant orange. In any other case, they would be beautiful. 

Kenma threw the petal back into the toilet, leaned his head against the mirror, and allowed himself to panic. 

Hanahaki wasn’t unheard of. It was whispered behind hands, talked about in hushed tones, spoken the way someone would about cancer or another deadly disease. It wasn’t shameful, per se, but nobody felt fully comfortable around someone with it. 

In his third year of middle school, a girl in Kenma’s class had it. She would leave streaks of blood on the desk and have coughing fits that could be heard across the hall. People would avoid her, ignoring the fact that Hanahaki wasn’t contagious, convinced that she would infect them. 

And soon enough, she had stopped coming to school entirely. Kenma never saw her again. 

Kenma took a deep breath. It wasn’t difficult to figure out who the unrequited love was for. There was only one person who made him feel like he was on fire whenever they spoke, and he was waiting on the other end of Kenma’s headset that lay abandoned on his bed. 

But Shouyou was in Miyagi. Shouyou barely knew him. Shouyou and Kenma wouldn’t even be able to recognize each other if they met.

Kenma looked at his reflection and watched a large tear roll down his face. 

He was in love, but it was going to kill him. 

\--

Having Hanahaki was shameful, and it drew attention, so Kenma decided to keep it a secret. 

He got used to it fairly quickly. Others watching him had always been something he was wary of, and he used this to his advantage. In class, he would watch the seconds tick by and swallow back petals and sometimes a whole flower would pop into his mouth and he would duck behind his hair, lift a hand to his face, and deposit the petals into his bag. 

He tried his best not to think of Shouyou’s voice, or his laugh, or the way he would yell when they leveled up. 

At dinner, he would grit his teeth as his parents talked before excusing himself, locking his bedroom door and coughing until his throat was raw and petals were strewn all over the floor. 

The pain became bearable, after a certain point, but the flowers never did. Sometimes it would be a slew of petals, sometimes a flower in full bloom. They were always the same color, and he could recognize them now - poppies. 

And in the meantime, he still spoke to Shouyou every day. It made it worse - anything that had to do with Shouyou made it worse. But Kenma couldn’t help it. He was greedy. He wanted to hear Shouyou’s voice, to listen to him hum softly as they played, to simply be in his presence, even if they were miles and miles apart. 

After about a month, the flowers began to exit his mouth stained a bright red, a sharp contrast with the orange he was so used to seeing. 

Kenma was scared. The flowers started clogging his throat. He had always been quiet, but now some days he would have to wordlessly point to the bathroom during school, painstakingly waiting until the teacher nodded their approval and running into a stall and retching up blood and flowers, so many flowers. 

He was choking. His body was, very slowly, killing him. 

It hurt. The pain of unreciprocated love had been materialized, and it flowed throughout his veins, the very blood in his body feeling as though it were poisoned. 

Kenma thought he had more time. 

During dinner, the flowers started to build up. This was no longer a rare occurrence - what he had considered bad days before were mild now. He excused himself to the bathroom and coughed until he was gagging, until it hurt, until he couldn’t breathe, but the flowers kept coming up. 

_I thought I had more time._

His father was pounding on the door. It was locked, but Kenma couldn’t stand up. 

There was so much blood. It dripped down his hands and his chin, and all over those deadly poppies, shades of red and orange mixing together and coloring the room. 

Kenma’s vision was flickering at the edges from a lack of oxygen. 

Poppies were beautiful, in their own way. Even though he had come to associate them with pain, when he truly looked at them, they were bold and brazen and gorgeous.

Just like Shouyou. 

_I’m sorry_ , thought Kenma. _I thought I had more time. I didn’t want to say goodbye._

The door opened. Kenma’s last view was the blood staining the bottom of his pale blue shirt. 

And then there was nothing at all. 

\--

Kenma had always been lucky. 

Being the setter on the volleyball team was lucky. Having a childhood friend that he had gotten comfortable with was lucky. And meeting Shouyou? That was what he considered one of the luckiest days of his life. 

And today, he had been lucky. 

One of the doctors at the hospital near Kenma’s house knew how to perform the surgery. Just one. She was on duty the night that Kenma had fainted, which was perhaps the luckiest thing of all. 

Kenma had heard of the cure, but he thought it was a myth, something parents told their children to comfort them from the horrors of Hanahaki. It was a surgery, one that scraped away the small bud in the back of your throat until nothing was left, leaving a scar on the back of your neck and a strange emptiness where your feelings for whoever caused it used to linger. 

Shouyou was now just Shouyou, and Kenma’s chest was too light without the butterflies weighing it down. He could talk to Shouyou without stammering or blushing. And he began to see the boy for who he truly was - nothing special, nothing out of the ordinary. Just someone who filled Kenma’s time, and yelled a lot, and was too loud for Kenma’s liking. His voice was grating, and his laughter was annoying, and he would hum sometimes while they played, which was just distracting.

His brain felt desperate, not being able to grab onto any of the feelings Kenma was used to, but his heart felt nothing at all. No love or loss or pain. Kenma was broken - he had been split apart and then patched up and taped together the wrong way. 

But he was no longer in pain.

However, nothing good ever came without the bad. And so when his coach announced that his team was going to Miyagi for a practice game, Kenma felt a spike of dread shoot through his chest. 

There were plenty of schools in Miyagi. Playing against Shouyou would be too big of a coincidence. It had to be Aoba Johsai, or Shiratorizawa, or one of the other, more advanced schools. 

But that turned out to be wishful thinking. 

He was sitting down. He had gotten lost on a run, and he knew Kuroo would come get him soon, but when he heard someone yelling at him it was the wrong voice, not Kuroo’s, but someone with a higher pitch and excitement lacing his words. 

What was floating around Kenma’s chest could only be described as terror. 

He recognized the voice. He recognized the laugh and the crazy volume of questions that the boy threw at him. And he recognized the color of his hair, because flowers in the same shade had strewn across his bathroom floor not so long ago. 

Shouyou stopped talking, and Kenma realized he had asked a question. His name. He wanted to know Kenma’s name. 

Kenma finally looked up, and their eyes met for one second. 

Shouyou started to cough. 

The petal was gold, the same gold as Kenma’s eyes, and spotted with blood. 

It would have been comical if Kenma hadn’t felt like he was going to pass out. He would have given anything, would have gone through all the pain again to cough up one more poppy and take away the strange, sad expression that haunted Shouyou’s eyes. 

Shouyou looked from the petal to his face and back again before it dawned on him. 

“Kenma?”

**Author's Note:**

> oh my look at that delicious angst dont mind if i do thank you


End file.
